The present invention relates to the field of telecommunication, and more specifically to a mobile network.
The usual known mobile radio communication networks are systems based on a cellular architecture. Such systems reach from the 2nd generation GSM networks, through 3rd generations CDMA, UMTS networks or their evolutions, through 4th generation LTE or LTE-Advanced networks. The principle of such systems relies on the fact that a plurality of base stations is spread in such a way that they offer contiguous radio coverage in a predefined zone. Each base station is overlooking a cell, the size of this cell depends on several factors as for example but not restricted to the maximum radiating power used at the transmitters' antenna(s) to communicate with terminals in the cell. When a terminal is willing to establish a communication with the network, it first identifies in which cell it is located and a network admission procedure is performed by the base station of the corresponding cell.
FIG. 1 represents a simplified illustration of a known cellular communication network. The represented cellular network illustrates base stations and terminals located in the coverage area of one of the base stations and consequently communicating with this base station. The principle of a cellular network is that the base stations are serving the terminals located in their cell while the cells are having a predefined size. The backhaul links establishing a connection between the base stations and the core network or the enhanced packet core as defined in 3GPP may be wired links or wireless links in the form of point to point connections.
Performance of such cellular networks and especially of the newest LTE-Advanced networks has reached a limit which can be overcome only partially and with a high amount of additional processing complexity by using techniques as joint processing COMP (Cooperative Multi Point) or MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output). The most challenging part in a cellular network consists in the cell edge where the interference situation prevents it from obtaining a good quality of service.
Achieving qualitative good user experience at cell edge is proving difficult even with advanced features like joint processing COMP or network MIMO, and introduces high complexity in the network while a large amount of data have to be exchanged between different base stations for coordination purpose at the cost of the user data throughput.
A particular object of the present invention is to provide a new mobile network infrastructure for coping with the above mentioned shortcomings.
Another object of the invention is to provide network nodes, a processing unit and a method for operating the mobile network.